Volunteer – Be Your Own Sherlock Holmes and Become a Seafood Sleuth

Anyone who has enjoyed a luxury yacht charter can attest to the epicurean delights prepared and presented by some of the finest chefs in the world. From select cuts of beef to freshly-caught seafood – only the finest ingredients are used.

Unfortunately, the same attention to detail is not always present ashore and back at home – especially when it comes to mislabeled seafood.

Recent reports suggest that species may be mislabeled as much as 25 to 70 percent of the time for commonly swapped species such as red snapper, Atlantic cod, and wild salmon. This mislabeling not only rips off consumers, but can hurt our oceans as well.

That’s where you come in – the oceans need you, Sherlock Holmes!

The folks at Oceana, a celebrity-driven advocacy group for the protection of our seas, is recruiting “Seafood Sleuths” – volunteers to help identify seafood fraud.

Seafood fraud covers a number of dirty activities that seek to skirt the rules and rip us off, including mislabeling seafood as a totally different fish. In the coming months, Seafood Sleuths will buy seafood from either a grocery store or a restaurant and send a small piece of fish back to Oceana. The Oceana science team will work with a lab to use DNA to identify the fish species and report the results.

Earlier this year, Oceana tested seafood in the Boston area and found that 18% of the seafood purchased from major grocery store chains was mislabeled. The Boston Globepublished a two day story on seafood fraud in New England markets and restaurants and found 48% of the fish to be mislabeled.

You might wonder why this situation is not prevalent in the yacht charter industry.

Purchases of fresh foods for Caribbean yacht charter vessels, and indeed superyacht vessels everywhere, lies in the hands of the yacht’s highly-trained onboard chef. Most chefs personally visit the markets and select the entire fish, guaranteeing they are purchasing exactly the type of fish they want.